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"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
-- Bertrand Russell "The Conquest of Happiness," (1930)

Good news for McGeestock! Tret Fure has graciously consented to lend her marvelous talents to Tim's benefit. She'll be making an appearance sometime on the evening of July 24 at the venerable Lumberjack. Tret is about as close to being a national star as anyone who has come out of the Marquette area. Her presence is sure to enhance the draw of local music fans. The billboards heralding the event will be made by the world renowned Nashville company, Hatch Show Print (see Johnny Cash poster above right). Google them, they're way cool.

My friend from Switzerland, Andy Boller, an excellent piano player, left a comment wondering if he knew McGee. Fact is, while I'm sure they were both in the same A2 saloons 30 years ago when Andy and I played together, I don't think they knew each other that well. I knew the hits from Basel had to be Andy when I saw he googled himself to get there.

Speaking of Switzerland, let's talk about euthanasia. Here's a story by Sarah Lyall from yesterday's New York Times: "Multiple sclerosis came into Debbie Purdy’s life about the same time as her husband, a Cuban jazz violinist named Omar Puente. 'He didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Spanish,' she recalled. 'What we had was jazz, and a dictionary.' When she received her diagnosis, one of her first thoughts was: “How do you say ‘multiple sclerosis’ in Spanish?” That was 1995. Somehow, the couple have adjusted together to the changes in Ms. Purdy’s deteriorating body. They have adjusted as she has gone from walking with a cane to using a manual wheelchair to using an electric one. They have traded water glasses for plastic cups, installed a panic button at home in case she falls and put up a hoist to help her get in and out of bed. But there may be a limit to the Purdy-Puente partnership, so close it feels almost symbiotic. The possibility exists that Ms. Purdy, 45, will get so sick that she no longer wants to live. Should that happen, she says, she plans to travel to an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland and drink a lethal cocktail of drugs. As things now stand, she would have to go without her husband, she says, because helping someone die — even, say, by pushing a wheelchair onto the airplane — is illegal in Britain."
The question of whether a physician may assist a fully autonomous, conscious patient in taking their life seems to morally contradict the foundation of the Hippocratic oath: first do no harm. But as long as the patient is of sound mind and capable of expressing their wishes, who is better qualified to judge their quality of life. Shouldn't the patient's right to choose whether life is worth living include the right to ask for assistance, and shouldn't this aid be exempt from the long arm of the law. After all, 40 years ago abortion was illegal, but Roe v. Wade ushered in a societal rethinking in terms of the sanctity of life ethic. Regardless of fundamentalist jurists, like Antonin Scalia, who believe the Constitution to be a static document, the fact is, living human beings legally interpret what it says, and the changing historical context of when, where, and how it's being applied has everything to do with setting new precedents. Just as the desire to control the way we die has come to the fore in an increasingly secularized world, so too must the legislation designed to ensure that the evolving panoply of human rights be respected, change to meet new and unprecedented challenges to these rights. This is why social reformers, like Jack Kevorkian, inevitably move from being thought of as crackpots, to the status of heroes. It should be the individual who decides what happens to their life and body, not the government or legislature.

This topic is back in the news. Bernie Klein is a highly respected fellow around these parts. While I don't know him personally, I have been at activist events around Ann Arbor where I've heard him speak, and have many friends who know him well. He's a good person. Here's an excerpt from an article by Zlati Meyer in the Detroit Free Press: "A Pittsfield Township man's home was among those raided Wednesday in a multistate investigation by Georgia police, who claim he is part of a national assisted-suicide organization.Bernie Klein is the secretary of the Final Exit Network, a Marietta, Ga.-based right-to-die group, according to its Web site. A board member since 2007, he's a so-called exit guide, a former board member of the Michigan chapter of the pro-euthanasia group the Hemlock Society and an engineer turned social worker, the site said. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation — which was behind Wednesday's raids in Michigan, Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Montana — set up a sting in Georgia on Wednesday where an undercover agent pretended to need help with suicide. Bureau spokesman John Bankhead said Klein was not taken into custody, but agents arrested two people along with two in Maryland, all of whom are charged with assisted suicide, tampering with evidence and violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act."

Don't these dudes have something better to do? Who are they watching out for? The Netherlands has come up with a criteria for euthanasia based on community consensus whereby patients may elect to die by a carefully administered regimen of drugs in a controlled set of circumstances. Even the various religious groups in the Netherlands subscribe to the idea that individual choice should be respected as the rule of the day. The Dutch Reformed Church outlines its policy on euthanasia in its publication "Euthanasie en Pastoraat" (Euthanasia and the Ministry) that authorizes an end-of-life protocol when disease makes it such that life is no longer tolerable (Shewin B. Nuland, p.155).

Bobby Jindal? His oratory savvy makes Sarah Palin look like MLK. I almost feel sorry for the republicans. I mean, who do they have to lead the country out of the liberal wilderness of -- Oh no! Not that! – BIG GOVERNMENT! “Oh God!” indeed, from the hard throwing soft-baller who passes as a tough commentator. Please! The lone conservative voice to praise his post-Obama-speech-speech was, of course, Rush Limbaugh. Not surprising, considering that "shame" and "embarrassment" are words foriegn to Sir Oxy's vocabulary. Speaking of the Pit-Bull-Palinator, she couldn’t have been too happy about the Baton Rouge Slumdog’s disparaging of Alaskans’ concerns. George Bryson of The Boston Herald writes: "Jindal singled out 'volcano monitoring' in Alaska as an unnecessary frill that Democrats stuck in the recently adopted stimulus package. Jindal singled out 'volcano monitoring' in Alaska as an unnecessary frill that Democrats stuck in the recently adopted stimulus, 'Their legislation is larded with wasteful spending,' Jindal said. 'It includes ... $140 million for something called ’volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington D.C.' Jindal’s comments provoked an eruption of their own. Alaska politicians, political bloggers and some scientists began pointing out how useful it is to let people know when a volcano in their neighborhood is about to explode."

Paul Harvey - Good Day!